Maybe We’re Not Obsessed With the 80s. Maybe We Just Miss Them.

Y’all, I cannot open Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok without seeing somebody Chat has thrown straight back into 1987.

And I am just as guilty.

Hell, I’ve done myself. I’ve done Welton. I’ve done us together. I have laughed until I cried at some of these damn pictures.

Everybody has suddenly got big hair, shoulder pads, acid-washed jeans, glamour-shot lighting, and enough Aqua Net to put another hole in the ozone layer.

And I LOVE IT.

But tonight, after seeing about the 400th person transported back to the 80s, I started thinking about something.

Maybe everybody is having so much fun with this because we don’t just miss how we looked in the 80s.

Maybe we miss how we lived.

Because y’all, I am thankful for a lot of things in my life, but one thing I will forever be grateful for is that I got to grow up in the 70s and 80s.

I truly believe we caught the tail end of something really special.

We grew up before the entire world lived inside a phone.

There were no iPhones. No iPads. No social media. No Life360. No texting. No Find My Friends. No parents watching a little blue dot move across a screen wondering where in the hell you were.

Hell, half the time WE didn’t know where we were. 😂

And somehow we made it home.

Our parents basically had one tracking device:

THE STREETLIGHTS.

“Be home when the streetlights come on.”

That was it.

No GPS.

No check-in text.

No “share your location.”

Just look up. If those lights were glowing, your ass better start pedaling home.

And thirsty?

We didn’t need a Stanley cup.

We had a WATER HOSE.

And nobody was standing there wondering whether the hose was BPA-free. 😂

You turned that sucker on, let the boiling-hot water run out first because this was Texas and you weren’t completely stupid, and then you drank straight from it.

We survived.

Our phones were attached TO THE HOUSE.

Think about explaining that to a kid today.

You couldn’t walk around the grocery store talking on your phone.

You couldn’t take it into the bathroom.

You couldn’t get in your car and keep talking.

You had a phone attached to the wall with a cord, and if you wanted privacy, you bought the longest damn cord you could find and stretched that sucker halfway across the house.

You’d wrap yourself up in 37 feet of telephone cord trying to get around the corner so your mother couldn’t hear you talking to a boy.

And when you got mad?

Ohhhh, baby.

We didn’t gently tap a little red button.

WE SLAMMED THAT PHONE DOWN.

There was an art to hanging up on somebody in the 80s.

You wanted them to HEAR how pissed off you were.

BAM.

Conversation OVER.

And God help you if somebody else in the house picked up another extension and listened to your conversation.

“GET OFF THE PHONE!”

That was our cybersecurity.

And TV?

Children today will never understand that television actually ENDED.

There wasn’t Netflix asking if you were still watching.

The TV basically said, “That’s enough. Go your ass to bed.”

Late at night, the channels would sign off, and eventually you’d get that horrible static screen with what looked like a billion ants running across it.

SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

That was it.

Programming was OVER.

There was no binge-watching until 4:00 in the morning.

No scrolling TikTok until your eyeballs hurt.

The whole damn country basically went to bed.

And Sundays?

Everything was CLOSED.

Imagine that now.

You couldn’t decide at 9:30 Sunday night that you needed an eyebrow pencil, a rotisserie chicken, three storage bins, and a phone charger.

You were shit out of luck.

You waited until Monday.

And somehow… we survived that too.

Music was an entirely different experience.

We had boom boxes so damn big people carried them on their SHOULDERS.

Now everybody has these fancy little Bluetooth speakers and Turtleboxes.

Honey, ours required eight D batteries and a strong upper body.

And if you loved a song?

You waited for it to come on the radio with your finger hovering over the RECORD button on your cassette player.

And if the DJ talked over the beginning of your song?

SON OF A BITCH.

You’d been waiting 45 minutes for that song.

There was no Spotify.

No Apple Music.

No “Alexa, play Prince.”

You waited.

And waiting somehow made things more exciting.

We waited for songs.

We waited for movies.

We waited for pictures to be developed.

Remember THAT?

You took 24 pictures and had absolutely no idea whether a single damn one was good.

You dropped the film off and waited DAYS.

Then you’d rip open that little envelope in the parking lot like it contained your medical test results.

Half the pictures had somebody’s eyes closed.

Four had your finger over the lens.

Three were completely dark.

And that was it.

Those were your memories.

There were no filters.

No Facetune.

No taking 73 pictures to get the perfect one.

We didn’t document every second of our lives because we were too busy living them.

And being a teenager?

Jesus.

We had FUN.

We’d go to McDonald’s or Sonic and just DRIVE AROUND waiting for everybody else to show up.

There wasn’t a group text saying:

“Where are we going?”

“Who’s coming?”

“Send the address.”

“Drop a pin.”

You just knew where everybody hung out.

You showed up.

Eventually somebody heard about a party.

Then somebody else knew somebody who knew somebody.

And off everybody went.

Sometimes the party was at somebody’s house.

Sometimes it was in a field.

Sometimes it was UNDER A BRIDGE.

Because apparently in the 80s we looked at a bridge and thought:

Perfect. Let’s have a party under that. 😂

We’d pile into cars and trucks and drive 20 or 30 minutes out to Rankin Road where people would drag race while everybody sat around on trucks, talking, laughing, drinking things we absolutely had no business drinking.

Was that safe?

Probably not.

Was all of it smart?

ABSOLUTELY NOT.

Would I recommend teenagers recreate half the shit we did?

HELL NO.

But my God, did we have stories.

And the football players had Yahoo beer.

If you know, YOU KNOW.

And if you don’t know, I’m not explaining it because some things from the 80s need to stay between those of us who survived them. 😂

We snuck out.

We got caught.

We lied about where we were going.

We had crushes that couldn’t text us.

Think about THAT torture.

If a boy liked you, he had to CALL YOUR HOUSE.

And there was a very real possibility that your FATHER would answer.

There was no sliding into your DMs at 1:00 a.m.

That boy had to have COURAGE.

“Hello, Mr. So-and-so. Is Tammy there?”

😂😂😂

And if nobody called?

You didn’t stare at your phone wondering why.

You went outside.

You rode your bike.

You went to a friend’s house.

You found something to do.

We were bored sometimes.

And I actually think boredom was one of the greatest gifts we had.

Because boredom forced us to GO FIND LIFE.

We didn’t have a device feeding us entertainment every second.

We had to make our own fun.

And we did.

God, we did.

Were the 70s and 80s perfect?

Absolutely not.

There were plenty of things that weren’t better.

There are things about today’s world I wouldn’t give up for anything.

Technology has connected us in incredible ways. We have information at our fingertips that would’ve required an encyclopedia set when I was a kid. We can FaceTime people across the world. We can take a thousand pictures of our grandbabies without paying to develop a single roll of film.

Hell, I’m sitting here using artificial intelligence to help me write a blog about how wonderful life was before artificial intelligence existed.

The irony is not lost on me. 😂

But I do think we lost something along the way.

Privacy.

Patience.

Anticipation.

Being unreachable.

Being bored.

Doing something stupid without somebody recording it and putting it on the Internet for 14 million people to judge before you even got home.

Thank GOD there were no camera phones when I was a teenager.

Let me repeat that.

THANK. GOD.

There is absolutely no photographic evidence of a significant portion of my youth, and I would like to keep it that way. 😂

Maybe that’s why this silly 80s AI trend has hit everybody the way it has.

At first I thought we were all just laughing at ourselves with giant hair.

But maybe there’s a tiny bit more to it.

Maybe when we see ourselves looking like we did back then—or how Chat THINKS we looked back then—we remember a version of ourselves that existed before bills, mortgages, marriages, divorces, careers, kids, grandkids, responsibilities and the thousand things adulthood eventually hands you.

For a second, you’re 16 again.

You’re waiting for somebody to call the house.

Your favorite song is playing on the radio.

Your hair is six inches high.

Your friends are waiting at Sonic.

Nobody knows exactly where you’re going.

And nobody can track you.

You just GO.

So yes, keep making the ridiculous 80s pictures.

I’m going to keep making mine.

I’m going to laugh at your hair, and you can laugh at mine.

But underneath all the jokes, I think there’s a reason so many of us are loving it.

We aren’t trying to go back because everything was better.

We just remember what it felt like when life was a little less connected… and somehow we felt a whole lot more connected to each other.

And damn.

What a time it was to be alive. ❤️